You Should Have Watched HBO's Togetherness

On HBO, a network that's home to a host of sexy, provocative shows, Togetherness was notably less glamorous. It wasn’t that it was any less worthy of your eyeballs—just that it lacked the premium channel’s signature grandiosity. Vampires! White Walkers! Boobs! Lena Dunham! Which is perhaps why it had such a small following.* “Small following,” of course, being a euphemism for low ratings—low enough that, unfortunately, after just two seasons, HBO announced they would not be airing a third. Last night's season finale was also its series finale.

*I could only find three people at GQ's offices who watched the show, and, quite frankly, the people in this office watch an unhealthy amount of television.

The irony and misfortune of all this is that if the show’s incongruity—that feeling that this was somehow outside the realm of HBO’s trademark je ne sais quoi—is what doomed it, it's also the very thing that made it so great. It wouldn’t be fair to call it smallness, because the show had ambition, if not pomp. It was more a feeling of familiarity. Sitting down on Sunday night to watch Mark and Jay Duplass’s thoughtful, clever creation play out onscreen felt less like a primetime event and more like an engrossing couch-talk with someone who wasn’t just in your world but of it. There were no grand plot twists, no "Surprise!" cliffhangers, no long-winded car-ride dialogues where actors wax philosophical on the curse of consciousness. Just four characters—Brett (Mark Duplass), his best friend Alex (Steve Zissis), his wife Michelle (Melanie Lynskey), and her older sister Tina (Amanda Peet)—and the lens that followed their bumpy struggle through the rather standard American lives of middle-class thirty somethings. But even if you were nothing like these characters, to watch them was to watch yourself and many of your friends, experiencing both ends of the emotional spectrum—laughter and tears—but existing mostly in that middle space between big moments, just trying to keep moving in spite of the anxiety and insecurity hiding in your shadow.

[SPOILERS AHEAD, but also an argument for why you should watch. Quite a conundrum for you. We vote: Read on!]

Togetherness set its stage initially by building a big, frequently unhappy family. Alex, a failing actor, gets evicted. Tina gets dumped while visiting (who she thinks is) her boyfriend in Los Angeles, and with no stable career or family, has no reason to return to Houston. Both move in with Brett and Michelle in L.A., where they live with their young daughter Sophie and infant Frankie. (Wouldn’t be much of a title if they weren’t, you know, together.) But it became evident, over the show's two seasons, that the physical togetherness was merely a vehicle for the show's true purpose: exploring each of the character's individual turmoils.

To watch them was to watch yourself and many of your friends, existing mostly in that middle space between big moments.

And explore it did—masterfully conveying that for four people so closely in each other's orbits, they're each intensely on their own, grappling with shortly-before-midlife crises. Tina, desperately wanting to be taken seriously, to find a good man who can help her start a family before she's too old. Alex, hoping to convince Tina that he could be that man—and convince himself too. Michelle, trying to find worth outside being a mom-wife, and putting back together the marriage that starts falling apart when she finds it—and cheats. And Brett, waking up on the verge of 40, trapped inside of a family life he isn't sure he wants to be in even before he gets cheated on. They're all confronting the disconnect between what we believe our lives will be and what they actually become; as Tina says, “I just sometimes get the feeling that it's not gonna happen for me, you know what I mean? The things that I thought were gonna happen are just not gonna happen.” You have to cope with that reality on your own terms, but you come to learn everyone else does too. If the show's title is winking at anything, it's that there's a togetherness in that.

Good shows can make you feel, emotionally. A really exceptional show makes you feel like it's been written just for you, even if you're nothing like the characters on TV. Togetherness—for me, at least—did that. It distilled the heartbreak and the comedy in life's connective tissue, the real, poignant stuff in mundane moments that TV show creators usually don't make TV shows about. Like in season two, as Michelle is rushing the kids off to school, after Brett finds out about her infidelity and starts sleeping away from home. Their young daughter Sophie turns to her mom and innocently asks, "Why isn't Daddy sleeping in your bed?" It's a perfectly logical question any real-life kid might ask, but as a TV moment, it peers into all of the dark soul-crushing aspects of looming divorce better than any argument, fight, or dialogue could. In fact, when Michelle and Brett do confront her infidelity, the show uses it instead as an opportunity for some very dark comedy: Michelle tells Mark that she cheated on him, he takes a beat to process, then he projectile vomits all over her. And the episode ends.

In that way, Togetherness floated between genres. Many shows on our moving picture boxes are overt about what they're trying to do. This is a funny show. This is a brooding, dark show. This is a show about people who are really rich and sometimes marry Kanye West.Togetherness, like the characters that made it great, seemed to just exist. There was no end goal or resolution, no sense of getting from Point A to Point B. (Which might sound like aimlessness. But in these 30-minute segments, it felt something much more like therapy.)

Togetherness seemed like real life witnessed through a window—which feels even more true now that it ended abruptly and without true closure. As a viewer, you could sometimes get the sense that this particular set of problems began and would end somewhere far beyond where it scooped you up and would spit you out.

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